AMD's infamous derivation of the ingenious Alpha EV7 bus, known as HyperTransport, has been a boon to its symmetric multiprocessing endeavors. Now, after a few years of maturation, HyperTransport is poised to provide new levels of modularity in computing.

This new initiative towards the widespread implementation of fast coprocessors is not really new. Back before the Pentium processor took over the world, floating point operations were performed on what were then referred to as “math coprocessors,” such as the 8087 line made by Intel that accompanied the 8086 line of CPUs. Since then many high-end, specific-use computers have used specific-use processors, such as ClearSpeed's floating point processors or various FPGAs with application-specific processing elements, to speed up computation.

But interfacing with these processors requires some custom bus work, is rather expensive, and requires programs that are written specifically to take advantage of these processing elements. HyperTransport may allow such coprocessors to pervade the consumer market, increasing sales volume, and reducing product costs. Unfortunately, it is unclear whether or not the advantages of these coprocessors are worth the additional cost required to develop software to support them.

Whether or not this technology is brought to market, AMD is undoubtedly enjoying the attention.

USER COMMENTS 28 comment(s)

Good policy for current Microprocessors(10:12am EST Tue Mar 28 2006)When your processor cant do vector/poly push it off onto another chip, when your processor can keep up with audio, put it off on another chip, when your processor cant keep up with physics, put it on another processor, when your computer doesnt get your the floating point you want, put in another processor. In a couple years we will be running 27 add in cards and a 5Mhz RISC to juggle them all. - by asdf

Just another small baby-step in the computer world that moves ever so slowly.

- by Too Late Too Little

hypertransport or PCIe(10:51am EST Tue Mar 28 2006)Hypertransport is good for NUMA main memory access, but if “local” memory can be used (i.e. like a graphics card) then PCIe is probably a better choice.

I was wanting to plug a Cell into a PCIe slot, and transcode all my media that way. I believe that Cell already has a memory controller (just like graphics chips).

Bash AMD(12:40pm EST Tue Mar 28 2006)Why.. because they are so easy to bash..

They can't seem to make money

They can't afford to do their own R&D

They can't even afford to do any manufacturing in the US

The can't even take blame for their own failures to grow. Try and sue INTEL and claim it is their own fault. How could they get more market share if they don't have more fabs. Its funny, to blame someone else. The only reason they haven't been able to get more market share these past few years is because they didn't invest in the capacity. Their factores are full, but they are still at 25%… they sue others for their own failures…

That is why I make fun of them… They are a bunch of whiners..

And to Da Douche, I get it every night from a willing and hot spouse…

- by Get it ever night

Multi-cores seems like another bait by Intel(1:01pm EST Tue Mar 28 2006)General use multi-cores sound like caches, to me. More wasted real estate. At least cores can process, but caches were lining up instructions over and over and over again for very small performance gains. If one general core ships of instructions to other general cores in more time than it would have taken to just do the instruction, than what is the gain? If these are just unrelated general cores, what's the difference between running 2 OS in virt or on 2 boards? Does it seem like this feature is only going to be good for large server arrays? For now I'm sticking with diskless clustering. - by tech

With one little factory they are getting baited into a race they will loose before they even start..

They don't have enough silicon capacity do compete. - by AMDforTards&Rick

Da Douche(1:29pm EST Tue Mar 28 2006)You need to douche before I violate either of your holes - by Lex

generic socket for heterogenous processors(1:45pm EST Tue Mar 28 2006)The optimum might be that there would be just bunch of sockets on HT matrix, and user could pick and choose whatever processor capabilities needed. - by Joe Average

Lex(2:41pm EST Tue Mar 28 2006)I did douche! Comon! - by AMD Lover

Better than Hyperthread(3:57pm EST Tue Mar 28 2006)At least it gets some job done, instead of pretending. And Japan and EU do not agree that Intel is “successful” because it makes better chips.Guys read some more beside Intel newspapers and Sandra specs.

ht is fast(7:27pm EST Tue Mar 28 2006)but who want two buy a second chip- nobody thats why they stopped doing it and why the physics processor won't do to well- integrate in on to the same card as the gpu were talking otherwise heck no- it all comes down to simplicity- put it on the chip or forget it. remember rdram was much faster than sdram or early ddr, however nobody wanted to pair so it didnt' take off. - by some guy

Hmmm(7:38pm EST Tue Mar 28 2006)I wonder how hard it would be to write or rewrite code for a FPU…

Was thinking how it would go if they put a big FPU on the crossbar latch, so multiple cores can access the one fpu easily, vis-a-vis Suns T1…

- by Headley

chipace(8:55pm EST Tue Mar 28 2006)“I just wish that a major company would hurry-up and commercialize multi-cores for media transcoding”

Meet the Macintosh!

I edit video with Final Cut Pro. The Studio comes with an app called Compressor. It is used to encode any audio or video file into whatever format you are looking for.

Not only does Compressor fully use BOTH processors in my dual G5, it does full distributed encoding!

Get yourself 5 of the new Mac Minis, network them and have your own video/audio encoding farm! - by Apple Rules!

tabs(9:22pm EST Tue Mar 28 2006)add to your favorite.- by an american

coprocessors(12:03am EST Wed Mar 29 2006)My 2 cents on AMD whining about intel putting people on the payroll not to sell amd chips well its true. I remember I said this before but think back in 2003 and remember all the amd machines you saw in bestbuy and circuitcity. There weren't any enough said.

Now with the PCI-E vs Hypertransport well PCI-E is good for gfx cards and phsyx chip becuase they had local memory and pretty much didn't really coprocessed they processed stuff they were designed to process. A southbridge is more of a coprocessor than a gfx card is but if you look at the real meaning of coprocessing then ya a gpu and a “ppu” is a coprocessor. The only problems with those coprocessors is that the software has to be written for it to take advantage of it. It would be pretty cool however if say a processor needed more fpu then you just tack on a dedicated chip to a point where the cpu itself would offload the fpu work to it which wouldn't require rewriting a fpu heavy program. Thats a real coprocessor to me. - by Caliber FX

More SIMD less card(1:04am EST Wed Mar 29 2006)Graphics cards will become obselete when we get to ~8 core PCs with ~4 fpu's. Think about it graphics cards do vector math work. Add another SSE extension SSE4 that has dot product and a few matrix functions and graphics cards will be pointless. When you have a CPU Core running 2.5ghz doing nothing but graphics related SIMD processing how the hell is a 600mhz graphics card going to beat that ?! - by pfffff

By the time they got around to doing that, the graphics card lead would have increased even further.

The market place is moving towards a general purpose cpu with less to do, and multiple co processors, be they on cards, or in a socket on a hypertransport bus.

- by pffff on your post

(5:30pm EST Thu Mar 30 2006)People are missing that this is one big step backwards. The hole point of integrating as much as possible is to make everything faster. - by

back in the day…..(12:02am EST Sat Apr 08 2006)All the coprocessor hoopla being a step backward is bull. It used to be that the CPU had to process all of the graphics. Then went to an adapter. The CPU is an information manager, most of what it deals with in HT copprocessors is relegating information, not actually manipulating most of it. Therefore making it an excelent server application. The graphics card and maybe even the soon to be Physics card are representations of this in a client environment. I'll bet you'll definatly see ppus in Flight simulators for damn sure. If you can't process physics for that, its not a very good simulator. - by CO process this